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Google adds new tool that sorts and filters results by reading level of the content

In a recent announcement on its Google for Students blog, Google said the company is adding a simple yet exceedingly useful feature to its advanced search - the capability of sorting and filtering results by the reading level of the content.

As such, given the diversity of content on the web, the new tool - which will also help users who are new to the language of the content being read - will be able to differentiate the search results of the advanced scholarly essays from the somewhat incoherent content by the not-too-well-versed teenagers.

According to Google, users can enable the new feature by going to the advanced search page - which is next to the search bar - and selecting a reading level option for their search. The users can either annotate the results for later sorting, or search through only the "basic," "intermediate," or "advanced" content.

Despite the fact that Google has not elaborated about the mechanism that it intends using for differentiating the three reading levels of the content, it is being assumed that the company will be using an automated glance at the Flesch-Kincaid data of the content.

With general rubrics revealing that Flesch-Kincaid is accepted as being accurate in most, though not all, cases, the approach which will likely be used by Google will essentially look at the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word to ascertain how readable data is expected to be.